What's the Life Expectancy in Your Neighborhood?

Thanks to Professor Rubén Rumbaut for linking me to an incredibly interesting story about a new resource that shows the life expectancy in your own neighborhood, and allows you to compare your neighborhood with other areas near or distant from you. The project is called "United States Small Area Life Expectancy Estimate Project" (USALEEP) and it is coordinated by the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics and the National Association for Public Health Information Systems with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

These new data are available to everyone via the easy-to-use interactive tool available above. Typing in your street address reveals the average life expectancy for a baby born in your census tract or area, if current death rates do not change. You can then compare your area to nearby neighborhoods or communities, to county- and state-level data, as well as the national average. If you have a neighbor down the street who happens to live in a different census tract, your results might even be different, which we hope will spark some conversation about the differences in conditions and opportunities for health where we live. Ultimately, we hope this will inspire residents and leaders to work together to close the gaps these data illuminate.

Here's what the entry pad looks like (don't try to click on this--it's just a picture)--go here for the real thing:

I typed in my address and was surprised in a very pleasant way to see that the life expectancy at birth in my census tract is 87.20, which is higher than San Diego County in general (81.43), which is higher than California in general (80.90), which is higher than the national average of 78.80 (these are rates for both sexes combined). The concern is obviously in finding those places that are below average, and then to figure out why they are low when other places are high. These kinds of spatial inequalities in life expectancy have become an increasing cause of concern, as I noted most recently a few months ago. To be sure, a map of life expectancy by county in the United States that I blogged about four years ago, has a geographic pattern that is very similar to the recent map I posted of counties still feeling the long-term negative impact of slavery.

Demographic Legacy of Slavery in the United States

The latest issue of Demography has a fascinating research article by Thor Berger of the Department of Economic History & Centre for Economic Demography at Lund University in Sweden. This is an open access article so you can read the whole thing for yourself. The article is titled "Places of Persistence: Slavery and the Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States" and shows us the lasting effects of slavery on intergenerational economic mobility in the United States. This is not a pretty story and it is interesting to me that the research was carried out by a Swedish demographer, rather than an American demographer. Here is the map that summarizes a major point of his research:

And here is his conclusion:

A key contribution of this article is to document that the present-day geography of intergenerational mobility in the United States largely reflects the historical distribution of slavery, with substantially less upward mobility in areas with a higher share of slaves by the outbreak of the Civil War. Based on a variety of empirical strategies, the evidence suggests that this relationship is causal. Exploiting differences reported by Chetty and Hendren (2016a, 2016b) in observed mobility rates for children whose families move across CZs to identify the place-based component of upward mobility suggests that this relationship does not arise mainly from sorting of families across CZs; rather it reflects a causal effect of place.

And what is his theory about the underlying cause? Fragile families:

More fragile family structures in areas that had more prevalent slavery is seemingly the most important for understanding why these places produce significantly worse mobility outcomes today. Although these results are suggestive, they should be interpreted carefully because of the extremely challenging task of identifying the wide variety of causal transmission mechanisms that may link slavery to present-day differences in mobility. Further work is necessary for understanding how these differences emerged and the extent to which they link the past to the present.

For more on this idea, see my review of Isabel Sawhill's book, Generation Unbound... 

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross Will NOT Have to Testify About His Role in the Citizenship Question--UPDATED

The issue of whether or not a citizenship question will be on the 2020 Census has been a hot topic ever since it was officially pushed onto the Census Bureau back in March of this year, as I discussed at the time. Back then the story from Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross was that he was being told by the Justice Department that this was necessary in order to keep track of violations of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. That sounded a bit suspicious to most of us, and it also sounded suspicious to a federal judge who has now ordered Wilbur Ross to come to court and be deposed under oath about what really is going on. CNN had the story today:

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross must sit for a deposition in a lawsuit against his department over its decision to include a question about citizenship in the 2020 Census, a federal judge ruled Friday. 

The Commerce Department announced in March that the question of citizenship will again be included in the 2020 Census, which the administration said was necessary to enforce the Voting Rights Act.

New York, along with other states and cities, filed a lawsuit in April to block the government's decision to include the question, arguing it would intimidate immigrants and decrease participation in the census.

US District Judge Jesse Furman of the Southern District of New York said Ross's deposition, limited to four hours, is needed "because Secretary Ross was personally and directly involved in the decision, and the unusual process leading to it, to an unusual degree."

Information presented to the Court apparently indicated that the idea might well have been Ross's and that he had been quietly pushing it for a year before the announcement was made in March that he was being told by the Justice Department to order the Census Bureau to include the question on the 2020 Census. With any luck this will help Congress decide that this is a bad idea--as the rest of us have known since it first came up.

UPDATE:  Oops, no, it seems he won't be deposed after all. As NPR reported this morning, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled against that idea. However, the door was not closed completely on this issue:

The administration's request to temporarily block other lower court orders for the lawsuits, however, were not successful. The Supreme Court is allowing the plaintiffs' attorneys to question Justice Department official John Gore, who leads the department's civil rights division that the administration says needs the citizenship question to better enforce the Voting Right Act. Document requests from the plaintiffs can also move forward as the start date for the first potential trial over the citizenship question draws closer.

The case against putting the citizenship question on the 2020 Census short-form is currently scheduled to go to trial on the 5th of November.  

Will Demography be Destiny in Texas?

Thanks to Justin Stoler for linking me to an NPR story this morning about the very tight Senate race currently taking place in Texas between Beto O'Rourke and Ted Cruz. Cruz, of course, is the incumbent Senator while O'Rourke is a Member of Congress from El Paso. Cruz's father is from Cuba, although his mother is of Irish-American descent and Cruz himself was born in Canada and is apparently not fluent in Spanish, and he has an American, not Spanish, nickname. By contrast, O'Rourke is not Latino, but is fluent in Spanish and has a Spanish nickname. Which candidate will appeal most to Latinos? And will Latinos turn out to vote? The latter question seems to be the big one in Texas.

While polls show a single-digit race, O'Rourke will need a transformed electorate in order to win in Texas, where no Democrat has prevailed in a statewide race in almost a quarter-century. Specifically, O'Rourke needs to get dramatically more Latinos to show up to the polls in a state where Latinos have far less political clout than their demographic weight would suggest.

"For a couple of decades now there has been a 'demographics is destiny' narrative that has existed," said Manny Garcia with the Texas Democratic Party. "And sadly for many of those years, it seems like base Democrats — communities of color — were taken for granted."

In Texas' urban counties and the heavily Latino counties in the Rio Grande Valley, there's no surge of new Latino voters, according to voter registration data.

Since 2016, there have been single-digit-percentage increases in the number of new voters around the state's four biggest cities of Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin. In the heavily Latino Bexar County where San Antonio is located, voter registration totals have grown by less than 3 percent since 2016.

While Latinos are expected to become the largest population group in Texas by 2020, whether this is the year Latinos cost Republicans a statewide election remains an open question.

I happen to have the 2016 ACS data for the U.S. on my computer, so I did a quick check of the ethnic breakdown in the state of Texas as of two years ago. Among all people in the state, Hispanics currently account for 39% of the population, which is slightly less than the 43% who are non-Hispanic whites. If we look just at the population aged 18 and older (voting age), we find that Hispanics are 35% of the population compared to 46% for non-Hispanic whites. Finally, I looked only at citizens aged 18 and older--people who are eligible to vote. Here we find that Hispanics are only 29% of the voter-eligible population compared to 52% who are non-white Hispanics.

So, if O'Rourke is going to win by pulling in Latino/Hispanic voters, he has more work to do than it might seem at first glance. Tonight's debate should prove very interesting in many respects.

The Spatial Demography of Facebook

Where you are matters just as who you are (your socioeconomic characteristics) matters in life. This is not about geographic determinism; it is about social connectedness. This was illustrated beautifully by a story today in the New York Times highlighting research on the geographic distribution of friends on Facebook.

In the millions of ties on Facebook that connect relatives, co-workers, classmates and friends, Americans are far more likely to know people nearby than in distant communities that share their politics or mirror their demographics. The dominant picture in data analyzed by economists at Facebook, Harvard, Princeton and New York University is not that like-minded places are linked; rather, people in counties close to one another are.

Even in the age of the internet, distance matters immensely in determining whom — and, as a result, what — we know.

Distance isn't the only important thing, of course, but since people who are similar tend to live near one another, the effect is amplified. This is a strong reminder that we are social creatures, and that point is made nicely at the end of the article by Mark Granovetter, who was a pioneer in social network analysis:

The patterns in this Facebook data don’t necessarily mean that limited social networks cause worse economic and health outcomes, or that wide-ranging networks produce better ones. But other researchers say this data will make it possible in future studies to untangle why they’re related.

“This gives us the first way to systematically look at some of those relationships,” said Mark Granovetter, a sociologist at Stanford who has written influential papers on the value of social networks. “They have just scratched the surface here.”